Charting a future for human rights education through storytelling

• In Event: Human rights close to home: human rights education for civic action

Proposal

Can projects such as Human Rights Close to Home (HRCH) be adapted in other communities across the United States or globe? As new human rights education (HRE) programs emerge, like HRCH, the program developers can build collaborative partnerships beyond their local stakeholders. In the case of HRCH, a national advisory team has been established of diverse higher education, secondary school education, and HRE non-governmental organization leaders across the country who offer creative ideas for implementing the program. The development team has also begun exploratory conversations with HRE leaders in other cities. This forward planning can draw in other communities to begin reflecting on their own needs and the potential benefits of adapting HRCH in their home communities. This longer vision of replication and adaptation can provide a cross-fertilization of learning, research, and impacts by engaging new program co-creators.

This paper will draw learnings from the stories of other U.S.-based human rights education projects: Human Rights USA (1996-1999), This Is My Home: A Minnesota Human Rights Education Experience (2003-2016), and Human Rights Educators USA (2011-Present). It intends to analyze opportunities and challenges for replicating the HCHR initiative in other communities, adapted to the local context. It will demonstrate the importance of documenting the HRCH story, including transformative stories of HRE, in order to glean both the intended and unintended impacts of the program. This paper will offer an example by reflecting on and sharing some preliminary research findings on a study of stories from Human Rights educators.

Holistic, critical, creative, transformative stories of HRE are essential. The vitality of HRE depends on creating spaces for diverse voices and communities to deliberate urgent needs for justice, peace, non-discrimination, equality, and healing. The field is founded on participatory, collaborative storytelling leaning into justice for human and earth beings to thrive through navigating cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross-relational ways of knowing (Archibald, 2008; Brayboy, 2005; Ganz, 2013). The field must work to embrace openness, dissonance, and brave and courageous conversations to bridge differences while being responsive to emotions (Magendzo & Pavez, 2017).

A significant challenge for this HRE and Training field is how one can demonstrate impacts while embracing the constant evolution and learning within the field of HRE. Oftentimes in a quest to develop theories in a given field, the dynamic nature of the lived experiences can be lost in translation and praxis. By gathering and analyzing diverse stories of the scholar activists and activist scholars, we may more fully understand the collective impacts of HRE. The HRE practitioners’ lived experiences can illuminate ways forward for the future of the field.

Reflecting on Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit (Archibald, 2008), HRCH initiative participants, developers and other HRE research teams can creatively and collectively document their holistic heart, mind, body, and spirit learning. Through this accountability praxis, human rights learners-activists-students-scholars can reflect on their personal and collective journeys of co-creating new ways of knowing, being, and acting as they look to the future of HRE.

Author

• Kristi Rudelius-Palmer, University of Minnesota